Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Everyone, welcome to the 227th episode of the Atlas Society Asks. I'm Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society, and I'm very excited to speak to George Gilder, who I understand is joining us from my old stomping ground in the Berkshires, Western Massachusetts. He is, of course, a man who needs no introduction. I'm sure many of you are familiar with his 19 books, including wealth of Nations. And of course, we are here to. To talk about his latest, the Israel How Israel's Genius Enriches and Challenges the World. George, thank you for joining us.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Great to be there. And I'm glad to be attributed to wealth of Nations.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Yes, well, that's clearly how highly I esteem you.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: But I'm a critic of Adam Smith, though. Okay.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: And sometimes Ayn Rand as well. But we're going to get to that a little bit later. Now, as you can see, as our audience can see from the number of bookmarks I have here, I got tremendous amount of value from the Israel Test. I read about 100 books a year, and this is definitely in the top five most important reads for me in 2024.
So I hope those in the audience will go out, buy it, read it. We're going to put the links in there. But let's start with an encapsulation of the Israel Test. What is it in a nutshell, George?
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Well, how do you respond to people who excel you in intellect, achievement, wealth?
Do you envy them and try to tear them down? Do you feel they diminish you somehow?
Or do you admire them and emulate them and learn from them? And that's the crucial Israel Test. It cleaves the hearts of all of us. It divides the world into those who see the upside of success and progress, and it deranges millions around the world who wish. Who regard the successes of others as somehow a diminution of themselves, who imagine that somehow the riches of Israel were somehow stolen from the Palestinians? If you can believe that, you really fail your Israel Test.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: So obviously here at the Atlas Society, our focus is engaging young people with the ideas of Ayn Rand? And one of the most important ideas is that of envy, which Rand called the hatred of the good for being good. So, in a philosophical sense, would it be fair to say that the Israel Test, even if you take Israel, even if you take the Jews out of it, is really a test about whether or not, when confronted with success, you choose to envy that success? If that is your default, you want to tear it down, or whether you want to Embrace it and emulate it. And, I mean, I guess you could say that that goes for how we view people of any culture. The geniuses in our midst, the atlases in our midst.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: I completely, yes, is the answer to the question. I mean, it's.
In a way, it's a Randian book, and in a way, my entire career was inspired by Ayn Rand. I disagreed with her and argued with her, and she devoted her last speech to denouncing my theory of the altruism of enterprise.
But I think, in fact, her literature, Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead, really epitomized the insights of my works and including, in particular, the Israel Test, because the Israel Test shows that we're dependent on a few geniuses. Human life is not egalitarian.
They're the atlases that rise up and forge the new technologies, the new art, the new accomplishments that make it possible for us all to survive and prosper and multiply.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Right.
You know, Ayn Rand, of course, was also Jewish by birth. And I recently did an interview with Alexandra Popov, who did a new biography of Random, which has been attacked by all the right people, which takes a look, right? He's like, oh, we can never even look at the family or the culture into which somebody was born.
But Ayn Rand was clearly a genius and artistic and I would say, philosophical genius. And you and her had this interesting interplay, but you actually met her at one point, is that right?
[00:05:55] Speaker B: I met her in New York, at a party in New York. And I told you before whose party it was at Murray Rothbard.
And I used to go to parties at Murray's. I lived 10 blocks north of him on Broadway in New York. And Ann Rand used to come to those parties at times. And I met her there, and I admired her tremendously. But she insisted on the details of her, what I might deem her theology, that her Objectivist doctrines were not to be amended or.
Yes, but you know, embellish, embellish. Although she embellished them wonderfully in her novels, her novels transcended her philosophies, I think. I think her novels showed human beings and their fullness, which could not be reduced readily to right self interest alone, or let alone greed or.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Right. You know, Ayn Rand called art the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal. She did that in her novels in terms of recreating reality according to one's values. And also, she herself said just a few years before she died, the complete elaboration of a philosophical system is a job that no philosopher can complete in his lifetime. There's still an awful lot of work to be done. So I think maybe in the final analysis she did recognize and at the Atlas Society we embrace open objectivism, which among other things, elevating benevolence, engaging in open discussion, but also recognizing that there are aspects of the philosophy that could use further elaboration. So turning back to your book, you had a beautiful quote towards the end of the book.
Quote, as with all nations and cultures faced throughout history, by the plain fact of Jewish brilliance and success, we have a choice. We can either resent it or embrace it as a divine gift to the world. The envy of excellence leads to perdition. The love of it leads to the light. I mean, that's just very poetic, I thought.
But so since, you know, envy is irrational, does it does lead to our perdition and self destruction? Why, you know, could you speculate just from a psychological perspective? Is it the default for so many people? Is it a psychological thing? Is it a cultural thing? You know, Rainer Seidelman has done the great work about measuring social envy coefficients throughout different cultures. So what's your.
[00:09:21] Speaker B: Well, I think envy is. Envy is carefully cultivated by socialist politicians around the world. Their whole goal is to find existing wealth and expropriate it and redistribute it. And obviously envy and greed are critical to this process and it's the essence of the left and it's.
And that's why I think that Israel is so important, apart from its absolutely central contributions to the world.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: Right. Well, I was really touched by a couple of anecdotes from your book which you share in the final chapter. So you guys reading out there, make sure to read the entire, the entire book. And you were reflecting on your earlier life and you said, quote, I had flunked my own Israel test, but I had learned my lesson. So would you share that experience, your early days in your, I think, high school newspaper and also the experience with your Greek tutor that was really heart wrenching.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: Oh yeah, my Greek.
Well, Valerie's still alive, I believe. Valerie Laval was my Greek teacher.
And well, I was going to Exeter at the time and I was.
I've always focused in my work. I don't, I'm not. I don't juggle lots of things at once. Most of the time I focus on something until I complete it.
And so. And at Exeter they expect you to move from one class to another. And I did very badly at Exeter, although I worked on the student newspaper and magazine and I wrote more articles in the newspaper than anybody else. And I reviewed movies. And I was really devoted myself to this extracurricular activity.
And when it came time to name the editor in chief, the next year of the Phillips Exeter Exodus, a guy named Peter Sobel got appointed, and Jeff Lindbergh was his top assistant. And neither of them had really.
They focused on their studies and thus qualified to have this position, while I merely done a lot of fanatical journalism. And I told Valerian Laval, my great teacher back home, who I adored, that I was trumped by a bunch of New York Jews who kept their work at Exeter. And she said very meekly, I'm Jewish, you know.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: And that mortified you, right, that you're saying, oh, Exeter is fine, but there's too many New York Jews. And she says, you know, I'm a New York Jew. And there your dreams of romance were quashed. Okay. Apparently another tutor of yours at Harvard was Henry Kissinger. I can't leave your backstory without at least asking you about that arrangement. How did it come about?
[00:13:29] Speaker B: Henry Kissinger really was my crucial teacher and tutor. And it came about because my father, who went to room with David Rockefeller in college, my father was head of the Crimson, so I was emulating him at Exeter.
But David Rockefeller and my father, after graduating from Harvard 1936, made a trip to Germany where they actually heard Hitler speak.
And my father at the time, and David too, I think, resolved that this man would have to be stopped, that he was a threat to the peace and of the world. And my father immediately began civilian flight training and ended up being lost over the Pacific leading squadron of bombers to Europe, and not over the Pacific, over the Atlantic. Excuse me.
And so I was, you know, he anticipated the Israel test. And ultimately the Second World War was won because the US was willing to accept the genius scientists from Europe who were belt from Europe and bring them together in the Manhattan Project.
And the Manhattan Project produced the atomic bomb, which essentially made it possible for the US to end the Second World War and to launch a new era of progress and prosperity after the war.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, interesting side note there is we were talking a little bit before we went live about the way that the Atlas Society engages young people who very sadly aren't reading books for pleasure the way that they were 50 years ago. And so one of the ways we do that is with our graphic novels. And our last graphic novel is called Top Secret. And it was based on notes that Ayn Rand made for a screenplay about the making of the atomic bomb. And it shows this operation of bringing these geniuses, going around the world, gathering the geniuses, bringing them to the United States.
And its central theme is that this technological achievement could only be, could only happen in a country that. Where minds are free. Right. Rather than compelled.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: So speaking of the publication of your book, the timing in late August of last year is kind of remarkable. Coming just a few short weeks before the horrific Hamas terrorist attack killing over 1200 Israelis, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. This unleashed immediately hordes of activists blaming Israel for somehow prompting this attack, and a truly horrifying outpouring of hatred of Israel of Jews across the world, but most disgracefully on U.S. college campuses. Were you surprised by this response? And how do you explain it?
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Well, I think we have entered an era that my last book called Life after Capitalism, and it's cultivated by a generation of professors at US Universities and it's.
And it affected the students who also were intimidated by Muslim students who had been.
Who pay full charges at American universities. And you know, a lot of the Middle Eastern departments in US Universities are funded by Arab oil money. And so it's kind of a set of, of contingencies that resulted in this eruption. My book was actually the new edition which came out this year from Encounter Books was my introduction and Dennis Prager's introduction were written after the Hamas attack on October 7th.
[00:19:02] Speaker A: Right, right. Well, I think, you know, there's also this pervasive postmodernism, this kind of reworked re. Warmed over Marxism. Right. And that instead of you having kind of the proletariat and the oppressive capitalists, you know, you just insert whatever victim group that you know you want, and then you're able to demonize whoever you deem to be the oppressor. And often it is the oppressor is, of course, the groups that are, that are doing well. So one of the reasons I think your book so deeply resonated with me went beyond how the Israel test applies to one disproportionately successful ethnic minority and their nation state, but more generally to how we treat the atlases among us, the men and women of uncommon productive genius. Whether we admire them, whether we uplift them and thank them, or whether we, an Atlas shrugged, vilify and persecute them. In your chapter Hidden Light, you write that quote, at any one time, genius is embodied in probably fewer than 50,000 individuals, a creative minority that accounts for the majority of human accomplishment and wealth. And then you go on to elaborate how during the 20th century, quote, an astounding proportion of geniuses have been Jewish. So I guess I'll just put it bluntly. Why, why is that? Is it, Is it culture? Is it what, what's going on? Is it genes?
[00:20:54] Speaker B: It's all kind of things. I mean, it's.
Israel is.
I believe it takes religious insight to understand the role of Judeo Christian culture in the world. And this emerged from Israel. It triumphed around the world. Its spearhead were a small number of Jews who, wherever they went, they created new wealth and accomplishment and art, and also vicious revolutionaries. I mean, Solzhenitsyn recently wrote a book, 200 Years Together, which tells the history of the Jews in Russia.
And the Jews represent, really represent. Hundreds of generals in the Soviet army during the Second World War were Jews. And the leading Soviet figures and the Karl Marx himself and, you know, Russia.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: Karl Marx was, by the way, very extremely anti Semitic in his writings.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Solomon.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: No, Karl Marx. Karl Marx.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: Oh, of course. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of, of failure of the Israel test by Jews.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: I mean, get into that a little bit with the whole thing about peace now. How does that factor in?
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Well, peace now was, you know, this perpetual idea in Israel that somehow you can appease these militant jihadists whose entire lives revolve around killing Jews. They get rewarded when they die with additional pensions and in proportion to how many Jews they kill, that's in the Palestinian law. And it's just.
And so Israel, because of the world's peace movements, has not been allowed to really win the six wars that have been waged against it. They're always resolved without actual victory. So unlike Japan and Germany that became great American allies and capitalist spearheads after the Second World War, the Palestinians were subjected to a welfare state from the UN that cultivated a victim mentality and actually an anti Semitic fanaticism was, we pay for it with American billions to the UN Relief Refugee Relief and Works Agency of the un. And they have. So Israel's never been allowed to win any war. And so their enemies just get reinforced with every conflict. And Netanyahu is determined not to let that happen again this time.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Well, you have also a really interesting whole chapter on Netanyahu. I hadn't been aware of these many aspects of his biography. Now, one person who has passed the Israel test is Palmer Luckey. He's founder of Anduril, who spoke at one of our recent events and who calls himself a, quote, radical Zionist, end quote. He is said, quote, I think people take stability a little too for granted. They're like, oh, well, the state will protect the Jews. And I'm like, what state you think the Arab states are going to protect? You think that Europeans are inclined to go out of their way?
He continues. I mean, even in America a lot of crazy stuff can go down. It's not like all Americans need to hate the Jews for something bad to happen. You just need a large enough group to enact violence and you don't have to have that many people to do that. And it's no accident that Palmer's company is pioneering the kind of defensive technologies leveraging AI that could greatly enhance Israel's security. And he's certainly no stranger to the cutting edge defense technology innovation that's been happening in Israel over the past couple of decades. So if you would, George, tell us a little bit about how you, how your own interest in Israel's technological innovation began. When did it begin?
[00:26:23] Speaker B: I went made a trip to Israel to see Easy Chip Corporation, which is a communications company and network processors. And it was one of, I was my after wealth and poverty I became a technology analyst. And I've written some 15 books on technology now including the history of the Microchip. And Easy Chip was one of my choices. And Easy Chip now has been purchased by Mellanox, which in turn produced the communications fabric that turned Nvidia from a gaming company into one of the at times the most valuable company on the face of the earth. It is at the heart of all artificial intelligence advances that has been made. And Israel is central to Nvidia. As Jensen Wang, the head of Nvidia said, before we bought Mellanox, Mellanox had a bigger footprint in the data centers of the world than Nvidia did.
And this has happened again and again. We imagine somehow that Israel is a kind of burden or an embarrassment or dependency of the United States. I think it's more accurate to say the United States is a dependency of Israel.
Wow. I was, I was.
And and for all the US today, leading corporations comprise 70% of global market cap of all public corporations in the world.
And all the American companies that dominate the list of the top 10 market cap companies in the world, led by Nvidia with a $3.5 trillion valuation at various times are deeply dependent on Israeli innovations. Israeli laboratories, Israeli design centers, Israeli wafer fabs. The leading intel chip fabrication facility is at Karat Gak in Israel. And this is.
[00:29:30] Speaker A: I had no idea. So you know, my first visit to Israel was over 40 years ago for my brother's bar mitzvah at the Wailing Wall. And I remember the economy Back then was much more stagnant, much more status than it is today. In terms of industry. There was not much, you know, there was innovation in agriculture, but not much to speak of beyond that. So George, how and when did that turn around and who helped?
[00:30:02] Speaker B: This is why one of the reasons why Israel is hated, because Israel proved that socialism didn't work. Even with animated by some of the most brilliant Jews in the world, they couldn't make socialism work. And by the mid-1980s and around 1985, Israel had pretty much failed. It was running inflation rates close to 1000% and they had to dismantle the government and assemble a joint regime that to reverse this terrible collapse in the mid-1980s and really the end of the Israel dream. And eventually they named Bibi Netanyahu as the finance minister. And he had connections with the Bush administration at the time and persuaded John Snow, who was Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, I believe, to require Israel to emancipate its economy in exchange for continued U.S. support. And so Israel completely dismantled its socialist economy. Histor was the big bank of Israel and it had totally failed. It was the labor government. Labor union in Israel ran all the banking and that didn't turn out to be such a brilliant idea. And in the end, Netanyahu and his allies essentially transformed the Israeli economy, then a failed socialist state, into startup nation. And it became the spearhead of world economic technological progress and economic growth. And it's actually far more important when you actually analyze the technology is not measured in GDP statistics. It measures almost everything, as William Nordhaus has shown the Yale Nobel laureate in his.
[00:33:02] Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't really thought of it quite that way, that Israel would be resented for failing to make socialism work. Right. It's like, well, if you guys can't make socialism work, then maybe nobody can. So circling back to Palmer Luckey for a moment. I went to hear him speak here in Malibu recently, and in talking about Israel's defense, he said, you've got a problem when you're dealing with players who are not rational, who don't respond to rational incentives like staying alive or increasing prosperity. So how does one deal with those kinds of motives? And how does one. How does that not play into what you write about the economist Robert Almond describing as the blackmailer's paradox?
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Yeah, well, Palmer Lucky is an old pal of mine and he.
And I'm fascinated that he's taken this stance toward Israel today. That's wonderful.
He's a brilliant technologist who's made major contributions.
Robert Almond is a Nobel laureate game theorist and he has explored all the and inspired I think the current insights of the of Netanyahu that that you can't appease. Appeasement is actually increases the likelihood of violence that you. That and you have to be willing to use hyperbole. You have to have enough faith in your cause so that you're really willing to risk your life even to have it prevail in order to win. If you try to negotiate some rash, some apparently rational solution with fanatics who want to kill you, you'll just advance their cause. And Robert Allman is an extremely sophisticated and fascinating thinker and I devote a chapter to him in the Israel Test. But I haven't read it recently.
But it's game theory and John von Neumann really invented game theory. And game theory is a critical form of strategy that I studied with Henry Kissinger at Harvard and with Thomas Schelling, another Nobel Laureate at Harvard.
And Robert Allman is a follower of this von Neumann genius. And I believe that von Neumann was the paramount figure of the 20th century.
I have a chapter on it.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: It's pretty amazing.
Yeah, so we've got a lot of questions that have been piling in. So my apologies guys. As you see, I have a lot of questions of my own. And we could be also Talking of about Mr. Gilder's remarkable career, you know, his many, many insights. But we're going to pretty much stick with this theme for this show. We've got another 20 minutes or so. My modern gull who's always first to the gate has a question for you, George. Is there a correlation between anti capitalism and anti Zionism?
[00:37:16] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the whole theme of the Israel Test. You summed it up that anti Zionism, anti Semitism is really anti capitalism and it's not. And as Thomas Sowell has demonstrated, it's not confined to Jews in the west. In the east, it's the overseas Chinese and their some 36 million overseas Chinese. So they are not quite as miraculously dense in genius as the Jews are, but they nonetheless dominate the economies of Asia and have been subjected to pogroms in the same way.
And I'm not just talking about the Maoist pogrom against his own people, the Cultural Revolution, which is sort of the ultimate example of failure of the Israel test in Asia. But in Indonesia, by the early 1980s, late 70s I think the overseas Chinese controlled three quarters of the hundred leading companies, 75% of the capital and wealth and they were a tiny minority of brilliant people in Indonesia And Sukarno took over and killed them. You know, just a massive program of overseas Chinese. And Thomas Sowell says that perhaps the Jews should be called the overseas Chinese of Europe rather than the overseas Chinese called the Jews of Asia. But it's the same kind of phenomenon. We're dependent on a tiny minority of geniuses. And if you tear them down and you know, Elon Musk now is being demonized all over the place. And he is self evidently the greatest entrepreneur in the recent history of the United States, certainly since the Second World War.
[00:39:48] Speaker A: Another great question here, speaking of some of these geniuses, like Elon Musk, of course, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz as an investing genius. Guillaume Verdun, working on making microchips more efficient. These are all people that.
[00:40:08] Speaker B: Who is the last one?
[00:40:10] Speaker A: Guillaume Verdun. Guillaume Verdun, who's going to be the keynote at our student conference this summer. And he helped to.
[00:40:22] Speaker B: What did he invent? I mean, I've written the history of the semiconductor industry and I'll write a newsletter about this semiconductor industry. Four newsletters actually. Unpublished. Yeah, And I've never heard. I've never heard of Elon Verdon or whatever Eldon.
[00:40:40] Speaker A: His company is called Ektropic. I met him about two and a half weeks ago at an XPRIZE visioneering conference. And he pitched a successful prize to make the computing infrastructure more efficient in terms of anticipating and accommodating the coming computing demands of AI that will have a window kind of no matter how many nuclear reactors we build. So his focus is really on making the chips, making computing itself more efficient. But one of the things that I thought was most interesting about him is that he is one of the founders of the effective acceleration movement. He helped to co. Right. With Marc Andreessen, the techno optimist manifest.
[00:41:33] Speaker B: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, that's right. Yeah.
[00:41:36] Speaker A: So and so my question to you, or actually my modern Galt's question is have you been following this whole techno optimism versus techno pessimism conflict debate and any thoughts on Andreessen's techno Optimist manifesto?
[00:41:56] Speaker B: Well, I signed it or I'm cited at the bottom of it. And I'm regarded to have inspired it to some degree. So obviously I agree with it. I have supported. I wrote the introduction to a book called Super Abundance which is masterpiece by Gail Pooley and Marion Tupi.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: Yes, he's a regular guest on this show.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: Based on William Nordhaus's theory of time prices, which he unveiled in 1991 or 2, which demonstrated that GDP figures have totally missed the advance of lighting technology, lighting since he starts with cave fires of the Neanderthals and takes it through Thomas Edison and now the light emitting diode. All the history of lighting, which really has transformed all our lives, opened up the night to human habitation and activity and reading and it's the history of lighting is vital. And Nordhaus focused on it in measuring the amount of time a typical worker had to spend to illuminate his night.
Demonstrated that we missed by a thou, by a factor of a thousand, GDP missed this technology.
[00:43:56] Speaker A: Pretty remarkable. So another recent guest on this show was Todd Rose. He's the author of Collective Illusions. And one of the examples of collective illusions he talked about was the belief that young people today are actually much more antisemitic, much more pro Hamas than in fact they are. And one of the most eye opening things that he shared was how it's actually state actors like Iran, China, Russia that are using AI weaponized bots to radicalize young people on social media to believe the existence of this kind of anti Israel sentiment is much more widespread than it in fact is. So my question to you, George, is it possible that these countries actually understand what is at stake with the Israel test and have an interest in turning Americans against Israel and the Jews?
[00:44:52] Speaker B: I think they understand the dependency the technology leadership of Israel. The Chinese certainly understand the technology leadership of Israel, and although they're indulging the Iranians at the moment. But I believe this is a response to incredibly stupid American policy toward China in recent years. But anyway, that's another issue that we could discuss. But.
[00:45:31] Speaker A: Well, let's stick with that for a second.
[00:45:35] Speaker B: I think probably it may well be that the Chinese, with their observation of the overseas Chinese, their understanding of the role of Taiwan and the world economy, have a better understanding of the Israel test than Americans do with their egalitarian socialist theories that propagated through the universities and through the Democratic Party.
[00:46:07] Speaker A: So speaking of that, how do you think the election of President Donald Trump will affect prospects for Israel's security and peace in the Middle East? And if you were advising him on those policies, what would you advise him to do?
[00:46:20] Speaker B: Well, I think he did everything right the first time. I mean, almost everything right. I mean, he right away, you know, every president from Clinton and Bush and I can't remember how many presidents promised to move, promised to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem and they all got advised by State Department moles or whatever against it. So none of them moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem until Trump came along and he did it kaboom right away. And he also negotiated the Abraham Accords agreements with a whole group of Muslim states and almost including Saudi Arabia, until a setback. But the Abraham Accords really show the path to peace in the Middle East.
And now he wants Netanyahu to win his war quickly. And I hope that happens.
[00:47:44] Speaker A: So one of the more hopeful signs that we've seen at the Atlas Society, we take a lot of our video content and our graphic novels and we adapt them for foreign markets. And you will never guess that the language where we get the most views, the most engagement, the most positive feedback is actually Arabic. So, like, let's say we have a video, My name is Capitalism or My Name is Socialism, in English. It'll draw about a million views just on Facebook, but the same video in Arabic will get 6 million views or 7 million or 8 million.
[00:48:23] Speaker B: Amazing. Amazing.
[00:48:25] Speaker A: I mean, they are awesome by far. And so, you know, I've talked to people, including some of our donors, who have an interest in this, and they've helped to fund more of this content. Why do they think that is? Is it just, you know, population size or what have you? And what I get back is that when you look at the young people in these countries, that they are disillusioned with the previous isms, right? They've tried nationalism, they've tried socialism, they've tried Islamism. And so there's an openness to something new. And the other thing is that I know Rainer Zeidelman has found outside of the United States, outside of the United States, younger generations have lower levels of envy. Inside the United States, younger, younger people have higher levels of envy. So that's not a good sign. But to the extent that that plays out in the Middle East, I think that is.
[00:49:28] Speaker B: I also wrote the introduction to Zittleman's book that showed that. I wrote the introduction to that. And Zittleman shows that the group that most admires the United States and the world, believe it or not, are the Vietnamese. And the Vietnamese are the most pro capitalist.
[00:49:57] Speaker A: Yeah, the Vietnamese.
[00:50:01] Speaker B: And Polish. The Polish are second.
It's an amazing.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: I think that's kind of part of why I think the work that we are doing at the Atlas Society is important. People talk about politics. We've had a change in politics. People talk about politics being downstream from culture, but what is culture downstream from culture is downstream from philosophy. So finding ways to engage young people to encourage them to recognize that envy of any successful country or person or ethnic group is not in their best interest, it's self destructive and rejecting it and instead encouraging more of an outright admiration for people that have achieved great success and certainly the geniuses among us. So do you see other reasons for hope that this can be turned around? And I just gave you the example of the engagement that we get in Arabic speaking countries. But do you feel that there, the Abraham Accords for example, are opening up more opportunities for shared business endeavors that will discourage war?
[00:51:30] Speaker B: And yeah, I believe that's true and I think that there's, it's positive that the statistics of superabundance which show that economic growth around the world has been several times faster than anybody has estimated before. If you measure it by time prices, by the amount of time that a typical worker has to then to earn the money to buy the goods and services that sustain his life. Economic progress has been vastly faster than economic economists estimate. And GDP for example values government spending at cost and US government spending is massively minus value. I mean $6 trillion of punitive subsidies for climate change net zero goals is sabotage is economic sabotage. You couldn't, none of it is worth anything. It's all a socialization of our economy.
Well, private sector progress has been much faster and greater than anybody could estimate. So the fact is or has been estimated in super abundance and life after capitalism by time prices. So and Israel is, you know, it's very positive that during the last year Israel led the world in venture capital investments. In Israel, Israel led the world. The US with its AI boom, artificial intelligence boom also increased its venture investments 28%. Israel increased its venture investments 38% and it already has been startup nation. So this is, that's pretty much a lot of positive.
[00:54:21] Speaker A: Yeah. So that Israel increased its venture capital investment by 38% over the past year at a time when America increased its venture capital investment at 28.
That this is pretty extraordinary because I mean investors are not going to invest in a country that they feel is, doesn't have, you know, isn't going to be there in five years to provide return on their investment. So you know, I got my dinky little statistics about, you know, Arabic speaking audience is watching. But you know, at the end of the day the people that are putting their money where their mouth is and betting on a, on getting their money back plus plus plus by investing in Israel, I think that that provides probably the biggest sign of hope and I think it's also helpful and hopeful to remember that you know, America has endured and moved beyond periods of elevated antisemitism in the past thinking Father Charles Coughlin, Henry Ford, the Ku Klux Klan. I think that your work, George, as well as the work that we do at the Atlas Society, celebrating individualism, productivity, achievement, can help lead to more Americans passing the Israel test. So anything you'd want to add in terms of final thoughts?
[00:55:45] Speaker B: George I think that I want to come out and visit the Atlas Society. I think this is a thrilling. I've done about 40 interviews about the Israel test, maybe that many in the last couple months. And this was the last one before my publicity agent moves on to other things. And I'm delighted to meet you folks and hear about your work. It's an exciting accomplishment that you've achieved.
I admire it.
[00:56:34] Speaker A: The best is yet to come. The best is yet to come. Stay tuned. We're making some big moves. All right, well, so thank you again, George. I want to thank all of you who joined us today. Of course, as I always mentioned, if you enjoyed this video or any of our other materials graphic novels, remember we are a non profit so you can make a tax deductible donation at www.atlasesociety.org. donate if you've never donated before, our board of trustees will match your gift. And be sure to join us next week when Ashley Rinsberg rejoins the Atlas Society. Of course, he is the author of the Gray Lady Winked about the New York Times. We previously interviewed him about that. And he's also going to help us figure out what ever happened to Wikipedia. How did it ever become such a propaganda project? So if you wondered about that, then join us next week and hope to see you there.
